Goodbye WHFB (we never find out how much we cared 'till it's too late)

After I saw the 'how can we help GW make a good fantasy wargame" thread (fortunately deceased by now) I started thinking about what makes a good wargame in general (and not just fantasy ones) and, IMHO, it's all down to three things:

1. Official sanction for "everyone to fight everyone".
Obviously, people can do that anyway, but this way, it's not only permitted: it's encouraged - leaving people able to play a same-side vs. same-side game without jumping through mental hoops of figuring out a reason for the battle to happen.
Yes, I know: if they even need to have them, at least. OTOH, I always prefer campaigns since they give me a story behind those battles - and a reason for the fight in the form of Victory Objectives - so ...

2. Enables (and supports) literally ALL the different kinds of troops & tactics possible.
And I'm talking about ALL of them: Hordes vs. Elites, SchizoTech vs. Magics, Guerilla's vs. Brutes, Ranged vs. Melee, Vanilla vs. Gimmicks - hell, I'm sure there are several others I failed to count.
Note that I'm not talking about a player being able to field them - I'm talking about them having a chance of winning at all.

3. Has a unified, water-tight lore which supports and encourages the faction's chosen troops & tactics.
Shit like the Greenskins' 'teef' economy & WAAAGH!'s for example: the way it so completely meshes with their Brute-force approach is nothing short of brilliant.

I'm not going to go into the realm of mechanics or scales - they're not so important (as long as they support the upper three) as the basic points.

WHFB hit all three points on the head at once - which is why it will be so hard to replace.
This is also the reason AoS is doing badly atm: it barely hits point 3 - the other two aren't even touched.

Also: wargame design thread, I guess.

> 1. Official sanction for "everyone to fight everyone".
It's always depending on the lore and the description of the faction. Now it's always easy for bad factions like orcs, chaos, skaven and so on, as it is mentioned they are always fighting one another for power and beconming the next chieftain/leader. But it was also described as a part of the good factions of the warhammer world: humans i.e. empire, had always renegades, or a vendetta between nobles or open rebellion. Dwarves were willing to fight one anoter over grudges and elves were described as kind of insideous as with a fable for plotting and consipracy to gain more power for their family.
As long as the setting has average human nations, there will be always these desires for becoming the leader/gaining power and so there will be possibilities for civil war. Even among religious fanatacis like Menoth in Warmachine: "Your interpretation of the words from our god ist wrong. Die!" Although warmachine has a pretty lame explanation for mirror battle between the same army leaders (The other warlorck is an impostor - only the winner of this game is the real warlock) their setting is yet very good.
Now AoS lacks this striving for power when looking at the Stormacst Eternals. They are godly warrior, always fighting for good. There can't be any fights between them. That's the main problem. Other Order Alliance factions will fight one another over power and gold, no problem, and the bad Alliances (chaos, destruction, undead) will do it anyway.

>2. Enables (and supports) literally ALL the different kinds of troops & tactics possible.
This requires a good balance design within a faction as well as between factions. Now GW's balance design was never good. It's always "The latest codex, will beat the shit out of everyone else". This power creep requires either a reboot of the game every few years with a new edition or constant faq/erratas with edited troop profiles. GW put out errats so rarely it seems they were afraid of them. GW's way of "the old codex is valid until a new one" was horrible. Some factions were forced to play with no updates whatsoever ofr several editions. Just take a look at Bretonnia or the sisters of battle. There might be hope with the new 8th ed. of 40k.
Again Warmachine is a good example for overcoming the problem:
Troop A is too powerfull or to weak? Let's playtest it WITH the community and then release a new profile card that everyone can print out and use right away! No need to wait years until something is changed.

The problem with AoS lore is that it's to weird. Floating dimension bubbles? WTF?
People want a map they can look upon and say: "This is where my orcs fight your dwarves! There is a farmhouse to be pillaged or a treasure in a tomb or a messengers corpse with a note. The dwarves marched 3 weeks from the nearest outpost to get there and the orcs are from a different continent at all! They've sailed the great ocean and travelled trough swamps and deserts because their shaman had a weird dream vision or something." People want maps with kingdoms and areas where they know: here are dwarves, this is a forest of elves, here lives the mad human duke user next to a vampire hideout. The borders can change, even the geography, mountains rise, islands sink, an abyss to the hell opens. But give us something familiar. Not floating dimensions.
No bullshit like: "Step trough a realmgate portal and you're on the battlefield. "

Also where are the everyday people I can identify with?
Where is the average Joe serving in the military? Where are the stories of his family being killed, now he wants revenge?
Stormcast against Chaos all the time? Fuck you GW!

Wasn't a lot of the old WFB lore about ridiculously overpowered characters who could take on entire armies and slay hundreds of mooks without breaking a sweat?

It was, but it was also about those same ridiculously powerful characters getting strangled by a goddamn orc, like Lietdorf

No? Are you retarded?

You know you can go read it.

Sort of. Certain editions were called Hero Hammer for a reason, and it's hard to deny characters like Teclis and Mazdamundi were described as Dragonball Z tier powerful - I mean, pre Freiza saga anyway

AoS' problem is they tried to mimic wh40k. They thought they were freeing the community to create anything with a literally limitless universe, kind of like how the Imperium in 40k is so vast you can make any kind of your dudes you could ever want. The problem is/was, 40k still had places well defined in the lore, it had ideas to springboard off of. AoS is a beach of sand but no tools or toys to make castles out of it.

40k is also more instantly familiar as well. There's "Earth" and "Mars" and the rest of the solar system. It's recognizable before going all in on Armageddon/Tallarn/Catachan and into further systems like Badab. It still has regular humans fighting and suffering instead of everyone being a shard of lighting in armour or some retarded shit.

People also empathize with the struggle of man. Space Marines are cool becaue they are above this in a universe consumed by it.
Now dwarfs are metal men given life by a magic magic and strapped into steampunk tophats (what).
Woodies have a squatsfu riding a giant beetle who does something.
Nagash is now several hundred dollars and does something and stuff.


Nothing is really identifiable or familiar it's all garble mouth mismatch of genres and ideas.

>maps
This desu. The first thing i do when i buy and open a new pnp rpg is look at/for
1. Character artwork
2. Terrain (cities, dungeons, forests, etc) artwork
3. Maps
The first two are to get a feel for the world and how it's supposed to look, tge last to get a sense of orientation. If either of those 3 points is missing from the core set of an rpg it often turns out to be a pretty good indicator that i won't like the system presented in the book. Hell, even open systems like savage worlds provide token maps.

Best description of bad sandboxes i ever read.

Hero hammer was a thing in some editions, but the scale of the battle you fought on the tabletop was deliberatly left vague. So hero X could equal 5 mooks or 50 depending on what you imagine the 5 models he just slew to represent.
It sounds like you've been playing TWW to me.
I'l agree with that casters really were absurdly strong both in the books and the tabletop.

> "Step trough a realmgate portal and you're on the battlefield. "
YOU

actually it's the reverse, Stormcasts get teleported in and then have to fight their way to a realmgate to ex-filtrate. It would make for a neat videogame set up

>It would make for a neat videogame set up
>while Witcher and Souls rule the fanatsy games
Lol no.

X-Com man. Fantasy X-Com

So AoS IS the Dark Souls of tabletop games!

The dark souls tabletop is way better than AoS, sorry.

>This is also the reason AoS is doing badly atm:
Seriously?
Get a different song already.
It's been what? Two years and GW has continued to say it's selling far better then WHFB ever did.
>Waaahhh! Muh Warhamms!
Yes, Everyone gets it. We lost Warhammer for AoS but just get the fuck over it already.

>GW has continued to say it's selling far better
GW does not release sales numbers period.
Saying it sells better is just as much conjecture as saying it's selling worse.

Due to GW having a pretty long buffer in production we'll only see the impact the sales have right now in a year or two down the line.

>better than WHFB ever did

That's a meme, you dip.

The actual quote is "better than warhammer fantasy has sold in years", and even then, they never gave any stats to back that claim up, and assuming it wasn't a lie, they also never specified HOW it was "selling better". There are lots of ways to interpret that claim, and only some of them actually mean what you'd think it means at face value.

>assuming it wasn't a lie

GW isn't going to lie to fucking stockholders, in a stockholders meeting. That's really, really illegal

>they didn't explain how MUCH

there's the rub.

>This is also the reason AoS is doing badly atm: it barely hits point 3 - the other two aren't even touched.

are you retarded

Who would do such a thing? Just be a corporation and.... lie?

AoS shills are always a pathetic sight

I know, right?
Always at the bottom of that fucking pyramid.

sorry my discourse isn't high enough quality for you on Veeky Forums, my dudes, continue to circlejerk about how your dead setting was incredible and GW is the root of all evil and AoS is just awful because you have no exposure to it, because if you did I'd think it would be obvious how the points are, like I said, retarded

IMHO, the setting was good, yeah - mostly due to the and FYI, I tried your AoS, too - twice.
Have to say I preferred Rally Round the King better - and almost noone even heard of THW.
Last couple of threads on this subject show that KoW and T9A are doing just as good as AoS, too.

So, you've gotta ask yourself one thing: how come that 'awesome' AoS of yours still hasn't ground their faces in dust yet, huh?

This is a bad post

Lying to the stock market and/or stock holders is pretty much the only thing that businesses get caught for and can easily tear down multibillionaire multinationals.

I don't think it's awesome, I just haven't dedicated any portion of my free time to complaining about it nonstop, instead I've been enjoying it for what it is

if KoW and ninth memers were having so much fun why don't they fuck off and stop complaining?

As far as I'm concerned you have

1. People who are upset like big babies that something they liked was canned by a corporation and complain endlessly, not only when its tangentially brought up but also just starting shit to complain about it because they're still so butthurt
2. people who don't really care